It really doesn't matter much either way. Why not choose the option that YOU think looks best - with or without extra symbols?

About your post titles: if you want to make sure that these posts rank for their SPECIFIC keywords rather than for your OVERALL keywords, then make sure that the specific keywords are most prominent in the titles.

Google does index characters in the title field. Here is a little place I found help on details of indexing:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049138/What-Are-Stop-Words

Most people take 'and, or, if' out of their titles. Those are stop words and don't help out SEO. You will see these '|' a lot in titles with segmented keywords. They cost 1 character and look nice.

In the end all you need to consider is what your customer will like and remember the CHARACTER COUNT for titles and results. They are limited. If you go over the limit the person doing the query will see "Hello my name is Katie and tha...."

That was just a lazy example. I just wanted to point that out. I didn't actually count the characters out, but you get the idea that results will truncate titles after so many characters.

When designing a good site, you can follow rules for SEO to a 'T' and can rank highly because of it. Just remember if your search result doesn't look appealing to a human eye.... nobody will click on it and that makes all your hard work worth nothing. Best of luck.